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Poetry: A LIfe
by Myra Kruger Summary This is a collection of poems about my life, an anthology of my experiences so I do not forget them. The core of my memory revolves around my Grandmother Bertha, Buelita, ''so she is a large part of many of the poems I have written here. My brother and two of my cousins make up much of the secondary characters since we learned much together. I am compelled to tell my story because I hardly ever speak it. The endeavor has been both a pleasure and a disappointment, and I would like to share my poems so that I might offer my readers encouragement to do the same. Introduction While reading anthologies of 20th-Century American Poetry, I thought it unfavorable that such poems were racially divided. The editors of the anthologies seem to agree on a simple purpose: to break down barriers built up by stereotypes, social prejudice, and racism, and to promote instead, social equality, acceptance, and peace. My first impression in response to that was that we could not hope to bridge differences between cultures if we keep separating them. But after getting to the heart of the images presented, I found universal struggles because poetry is an open forum to exchange ideas and unite with others. I was inspired by the stylized language and structure of the poems in every anthology I read. I realized that to find my own point of entry, I must call on my experiences as an American. Specifically, I must call on my experiences as a Mexican-American woman – or perhaps, more truly – as a Mexican-American woman of a working-class family that suffers from division and instability. My intent for this project is to present my own poems, my own community, my own suffering, and position it within recent scholarship surrounding Latin@ and Chican@ poetry. Poetic Code-Switching David Colon points out that Latin@ poetics is necessarily ''other because the position of the people and their language is dependent on antithetical reasoning: socially chaotic and defined by the juxtaposition of U.S. and Mexico and by what is present and what is not present in Western identity.To further his argument, Colon deconstructs nationalism and concludes that such faulty ideals lead to migration and immigration, economic downfall, faulty education, and the displacement of the individual. Linguistic code-switching facilitates “politically charged” expression that “fosters a voice of agitation." Colon frames his argument that “poetics of the other would need to be born from violence...by a disruption of language" and providing for what is inevitably lost in translation. Therefore, Latin@ poetry is an expression of the other ''in a revolutionary art form that preserves culture as it adapts to the individuals as well as to the changing history they necessarily affect. Inspired by Indigenous American Poetry Many of the poems in ''Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (2011), edited by Allison Hedge Coke, made me think that they could be written about my old neighborhood in Brownsville, TX. Welcome to Las Prietas, I thought as I read Santee Frazier’s Coin Laundry, “Spinning washers. Whirr of dryers. Soda machine humming." I learned how to wash mine and my mother’s and my little brother’s laundry before I was ten and out of elementary school. I learned to separate our little rags by color and fold them right out of the dryer so as to create neat folded lines. I entertained myself with the sorting and organizing and my brother entertained himself with the red-coated peanuts from the candy machine. I imagine such poems describe most of the American underclass experience, and perhaps that is the point, to some extent: "1004 Military Highway" The double-wide-trailer-sized shop still stands on the corner of Military Highway and Center Drive, right across the street from a used car lot which sits on what used to be my grandmother’s garden. The neighborhood kids and I would race home to buy candy shaped into little cigarettes wrapped in white and blue boxes. We came home happy from Garden Park Elementary School on Nell Palmer and Military Highway. Nell Palmer. Named for the school’s first principal – the Lady who called on the neighborhood homes to make her proper introduction to the families of the children who would be attending school in the fall. My mother remembers watching Nell Palmer walk on the caliche road that led to their house. It had rained, but Nell Palmer walked like a starched clean lady of refinement in her blue suit. My mother and her little sister and little brother crouched in shame as their Doberman Pincher, Hitler, jumped on the principal. It was all Adolfo’s fault for not training the dog better! Their older brother probably wouldn't care, but their three white faces turned crimson. What kind of impression is that to leave on their new principal? Nell Palmer, in her starched blue suit and collared blouse. Around her thin, pale neck, a gold crucifix caught the light of scarce rays... The candy cigarettes were not tasty – a little like distilled mint that’s lost its flavor – and when we sucked on them we pretended the dust that fell were puffs of smoke. I thought it would be cool to buy some for my little cousins. We crouched behind the great tree, raised in its brick pedestal painted blue and white. The galan de noche fragrant around its base, but not as fragrant as it was at night because, you see, that’s when its perfume penetrates the soul. Even today, so many years since I lived in Buelita’s home, my dreams are haunted by it. We giggled and we laughed when we put our little red lips to the white sticks. But the next day the youngest one said, mommy said we should not buy the little cigarettes anymore because they’re bad. I didn’t understand why because my stepdad smoked a lot, and my mom, and their friends, and, also, I’d breathed the smoke all my life. But, my stepdad was bad. And my mom was wounded and sad. And their friends were long gone. And, also, I didn’t want to be any of those things, so I understood. Inspired by Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry Many of the poems in the first section of The FSG book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry (2012), edited by Ilan Stavans, were wonderfully filled with humor and disappointment. Jose Asuncion Silva wrote A Poem to describe what it feels like to write poetry – the ecstasy one feels when outpouring your heart on paper, the fulfillment one feels “to join sweet syllables as with the taste of a kiss." Aptly true, too, is the heartbreak the poet feels when finished with writing the “embroidered expressions with gold," so proud and relieved of the agony. Then, when the poet shows it to someone else, the “critic” responds with a heavy note, “I don’t understand it." The humor of this was not wasted on me, but neither was the pain. In the end, I found that the poem I liked most was Pablo Neruda’s Poem XX: Tonight I Can Write: “Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long." The poem was filled with images of wonder-lust that made me fancy the poem was written about me. Or, at least, it combines the classical elements of a woman – the saint, the lover, and the whore – into a delightful heartbreak. It was a story. It was a kiss. It was pride and bitterness. It was loss and love. It was the heavens, death and resurrection. It reminded me of growing up watching female leads like Vivien Leigh (as Scarlett O'Hara) and Anne Baxter (as Nefertiri), believing they were what real women in romantic relationships should emulate: “Gwyneth Fair” Gwyneth loves her gorgeous man. He tells her what to do and she does it with pleasure. Muscled and deep, hard and unyielding. In private moments with her, his eyes darken with desire. They melt into each other. Blood and bones are binding. Gwyneth is Queen Be- Loved Above All Else. And then there’s such a boy, so golden, soft and loyal. The pink lips kiss hers. A promise. Not of what you’ll have… it was to let you know what you will not have. ''Chaste and sweet, delicious. The snakey bitch, she smiles! ''I could never love you. ''He flushes in agony. Gwyneth is Queen Be- Loved Above All Else. Inspired by Asian-American Poetry Many of the poems in ''Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004), edited by Victoria Chang, are from the perspective of middle-class, second generation Asian Americans who reflect on growing up at odds with assimilation. Specifically, they have unresolved issues with their immigrant parents, extended family members, and neighbors. The resentment felt towards their parents, the communal raping of children, and the humiliation of poverty, make American living difficult for the poets. Such hateful sexualization and humble beginnings make for detached and deeply scarred individuals who feel like “an orange plastic fish that bobs mechanically in circles” and can’t stop because the void cannot be filled; individuals who will “go through life, their mind a stopless knife, driven by a fantasy of truth, of lasting union": “Red Tights with Chinese Dragons Encircling Her Pretty Legs” She walks in silence like the night. She has long, Hershey-colored tresses that fall in soft curls. She has ink-black eyes beneath dark lashes, and rounded bee-stung lips that were mocked before Angelina made them popular. The Boys on the playground want to touch her. The Girls say She is overbearing and mean. She is withdrawn, disconnected. Dad was…who knows? Mom was…who cares? She raised herself, quietly ashamed. She has a deep yearning to connect, to understand suffering. She doesn’t blame Anyone for the ugliness inside because there isn’t Anyone left to blame. Not since He is too distant a memory and too dead to blame anyway. When He was not so old, He chased her. He curled his knotted fingers beneath the bed. He told her He never married because He liked girls like her. She was five and never let Anyone know why She hated Him. So, She laughs and plays and lives to the beat of her own noisy drum, mostly because She never heard another. She never allowed another and They whisper She is a heartless, narcissistic bitch, really, who suffers from delusions of grandeur. She sits in silence and in beauty like the night. She wears long, black dresses that fall in soft swirls. She wears ink-black nails beneath the hot summer sun, and 10-hole Doc Martens lace around her red tights with Chinese Dragons encircling her pretty legs. The Boys grab at her and the Girls laugh at her. Dad tries to save her and Mom hates to love her. And She lets them all, mostly because She is grateful. Inpired by Outlaw Poets The “absurd” nature of the paradoxical ideas in Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999), edited by Alan Kaufman and S.A. Griffin, recalls the philosophical work of Albert Camus – deeply individual, devoid of sexual repression, and demeaning of solidarity born from the rebellion deemed necessary to American life. The Outlaw poets are resentful of the façade that religious “control words” create to limit man from a genuine, “real fire into living breath,” experience of God. Religious freedom and its implications on morality are called into question. Man’s purpose and meaning is explored through fierce “principle and belief” that one day death will be glorious, filled with the whims of our own great importance coupled with the startling reality that we are small, and mostly insignificant, outside of our own experience. Ultimately poetry is, for the Outlaw poets, more than just “how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a machine gun”; it is the cathartic “vomit” that serves to fuel the fire of life in a dying world. Fellow man is invited to “Drink to wonder, drink to me, drink to pussy and dreams” in celebration of life – the close relationship of good and bad, love and hate, and sadness and happiness. The poets of counterculture call for change through antithetical consistencies, abrupt and deliberately focused on the negative, so as to highlight the hope for a brighter future they doubt exists and yet know must exist. “Bridegroom” The floor is scrubbed, the carpet swept, the sheets are out to dry – all is ready for the groom and his bride. At the end of the narrow hallway, a door opens onto a tiny porch – a necessary attachment and not a luxury – that our father, our namesake Forgotten built with plywood and large, strong hands whose elegance and glory no one remembers until he dies. We hold our breath for fear of shame. But how can you hide from fear when you sup at his table and sleep in his bed? And how can you ignore shame when you have Forgotten to clean the top of the Frigidaire? The dust is thick. Each speck is leaden with sweat, heavy with grease, dark with lust and history Forgotten beneath loaves of stale bread and rotting bananas. Hot with sighs of defeat. A tiny rodent lives in his cage – a gift from better days Forgotten. He spins on his wheel so happily, but now he sits so helplessly on the tiny porch at the end of the hall. Outside, the sun is blinding. He cries and no one hears! His blood turns toxic and the heat and the ants are more than he can bear in his final sigh of release. Mestizaje: A Theory of Hybridization Daniel Belgrad explores otherness as a common place, a distinct borderland where the blending of cultures enriches the other in a mutually beneficial terrain. The rigid bounds of American and Mexican cultures, as well as those of “cultural hybridization,” are deconstructed because the Chican@ identity is permeated on the “dynamic interaction of both."The language becomes a reflection of a third space where an outsider is told they “know nothing” and is, in the next breath, welcomed to participate and learn. Belgrad’s psychological approach to proving his position relies on Chicano rap artists’ poetic dialectic play on words and the “glyph” art that combines elements of both cultures to create a new one. Essentially, Belgrad argues that such artists create a rhetorical interplay of “accessibility” to create Chican@ “performativity” and assert their presence in society. In a more democratic, but similar approach to the theory of hybridization, Cristina Beltran takes issue with scholars who deem Gloria Anzaldua’s perpetuation of mestizaje incapable of achieving fair subjectivity. Beltran argues that post-modernist theories such as Anzaldua’s create the third space needed for marginalized, disempowered people to thrive politically, physically, and emotionally. She concedes that, although categorization of otherness inherently embodies a separation, it is nonetheless a separation where intellectual freedom and acceptance is possible. Beltran organizes her argument around finding faults or filling gaps in the theoretical works of others to illustrate the important historical development of mestizaje and the complex identities that it defines. To that end, Beltran posits the dangers that currently exist with the common approach to mestizaje both in literature and politics. For example, the complexities of gender, queerness, race, economy, and individuality are not given due consideration and are instead falling prey to assimilation. Beltran’s answer to the problem is that, although Anzaldua’s challenge to paradigms has pitfalls, they are not as some scholars believe – that is, incomplete analyses – rather, they are opportunities to continue to map the paradigms just as the dynamics of borders are in constant flux to include others. "Reverse Discrimination" ' ' You say you like numbers, statistics, facts: every single document in existence from the founding of America until this very instant shows that a Caucasian, middle-class male has a greater opportunity at success. How 'bout them apples? If this hasn’t worked for you and your sons, maybe it has more to do with you than with the society in which you live. Had you considered it could be your laughing disdain at the expense of Others? Had you considered that it could be your rebellious tattoos, your arrogance, your hatred, your overgrown belly? You say to us you were not born with a golden spoon, a degree at Dartmouth, or a harem of women. Like it’s something to lament. Like we owe you respect. Like we owe you an apology. You say we're dirty. You call us ignorant. You impose your will on us like it matters. Who sits first in front? You do. Who monopolizes and manipulates the information? You do. Who cries about injustice? You do. We stay quiet, silenced and patient. We remain polite and considerate. No one checks you. Stop telling us we don’t understand. Stop telling us that “gringo” is the same as “nigger.” Stop telling us that you’re lonely because there aren’t any other white people and only Mexicans surround you. You say you like apples: I smile at you when you require that I do so. You impose your person on mine and I feel the weight of your hand on the small of my back. I smell the stench of your sweat mix with the heat of your breath. You say you want me to'' French'' you. Say it again… say you feel rejected, defamed, misunderstood, lonely and alone – say it and compound it sevenfold. My mother and grandmother and I shit in an outhouse with flies that bite. The blood of the animals we raise mix with our own. The rank smell of poverty lingers on me and it is the perfume of humility. The worms in my belly are a testament to my story. I am Latina, Americana, Chicana, Mexican-American, Hispanic…Like it matters. I am a woman. It’s only just beginning. In Conclusion Sonia V. Gonzalez’s interview transcript chronicles a conversation between herself and Lorna Dee Cervantes about Cervantes' poetic journey that began when she was eight years old. As the interview continues, many layers about Cervantes’ life are parted to reveal a deeply scarred individual who, despite the odds, became a successful political activist denouncing “racism, sexism, violence against women, and oppression of the disempowered." I believe her experience is communicative of one shared by many modern Americans, including interesting parallels to my own life: Cervantes’ primary caretaker was her maternal grandmother, a woman who kept a home for her daughter and granddaughter and who loved to garden. The poems I have included are of varied form and structure and the themes are derived from my own struggles. It has been my intention to interweave my own Latin@/Chican@ voice into the third space, into the borderland. ''"Rancho Los Hermanos'', San Fernando, Tamps., Mexico" We are Buelita's ''children, loved and admired. Our great-grandfathers are ''Robles and Herrera, named after the strongest, oldest wood and after an ironsmith. Our fathers are Solis and Da Luz, both meaning light. One comes from the mountaintops of Mexico City, and one is a Portuguese traveller... I was too small for my age – thin, dark, and spritely. My little brother was too strong for his age – fast, fair, and filled with laughter. Mockingbirds of Texas are illegal to capture. We knew that law, but these were Mockingbirds of Los Hermanos. There are different laws in different lands. We knew that, too. The Mockingbirds grew up strong on maza ground from the cornfields and on chivas we hunted among the cacti. They learned to fly, eventually, and left us on the cool night breeze over the river that summer. We also would return home to the beautiful hill country of Texas, to a man named Canava who was the opposite of light and the opposite of majesty and strength. The darkness of his house threatened to snuff us out, but my little brother and I held fast, held together. Buelita would be proud of our faith and our courage. Works Cited Beltran, Cristina. "Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje." Political Research Quarterly 57.4 (2004): 595-607. JSTOR. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. Coke, Allison Adelle. Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas. Tucson: U of Arizona, 2011. Print. Colon, David. "Other Latino Poetic Method.” Culture Critique 47 (2001): 265-86. JSTOR. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. Gonzalez, Sonia V., and Lorna Dee Cervantes. "Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes." MELUS 32.1 (2007): 163-80. JSTOR. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. Kaufman, Alan. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1999. Print. Stavans, Ilan. The FSG Book of Twentieth-century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2011. Print.